Chronicling Poverty

Over the last twenty years more and more historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have turned their eyes away from the records of central administration, towards local archives, and the lives of the poor. What they have found is a wealth of sources some of which chronicle the lives, and many of which record the words, of working people. This book will bring together some of the best work based on these sources.

List of Tables and Figures List of Abbreviations Notes on the Contributors Introduction Going on the Parish: the Parish Pension and Its Meaning in the London Suburbs 1640-1724; J.Boulton London Domestic Servants from Depositional Evidence, 1660-1750: Servant-Employer Sexuality in the Patriarchal Household; T.Meldrum 'Unlawfully Begotten on Her Body': Illegitimacy and the Parish Poor in St Luke's, Chelsea; T.Hitchcock 'The Bowels of Compation': a Labouring Family and the Law c.1790-1834; P.Sharpe Voices in the Crowd: the Kirby Lonsdale Township Letters 1809-36; J.S.Taylor Old Age in Poverty: the Record of Essex Pauper Letters 1780-1834; T.Sokoll Pauper Inventories and the Material Life of the Poor in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries; P.King 'An Old Offender tho' so Young in Years': the Criminal Careers of Juvenile Offenders in Middlesex in the 1830s; H.Shore 'The Poor in Blindnes': Letters from Mildenhall, Wilts 1835-6; G.C.Smith Index